


MDCCCVII And All That

by Cerdic519



Series: A Saga Of Immodesty And Frankness [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, AUSTEN Jane - Works, Game of Thrones (TV), Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Genre: 1807, 19th Century, England (Country), F/M, France (Country), M/M, References to Jane Austen, United States
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 19:04:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19215625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerdic519/pseuds/Cerdic519
Summary: Who was who and what was what in 1807. Not absolutely necessary for the main story but it explains a few things.





	MDCCCVII And All That

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bookworm4ever81](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookworm4ever81/gifts).



LIFE IN LONGBOURN  
֍ The story takes place between four places: Pemberley, the Derbyshire home of Jaime and Tyrion Lannister; Hertfordshire (Meryton, Longbourn and Netherfield Park); the capital London; and Rosings, Lady Alcyone's country seat in Kent. These are the following distances apart: Pemberley to Longbourn 135 miles SSE, Longbourn to London 30 miles SE, and London to Rosings ESE 40 miles.  
֍ Longbourn, where much of the story takes place, is most likely Redbourn, now a growing commuter town. It then lay on the main road between London and the Midlands, which had by this time been 'turnpiked' (i.e. upgraded by a toll-charging company). Meryton, probably nearby Harpenden, lay on an alternative main road to the north, so the two places would have seen some through traffic and have been busier than many country towns. However as Jaime Lannister correctly assesses, any newcomers to the area are still worth gawping at.  
֍ Affecting everyone in this book is Round Two of the interminable war with Revolutionary France. The French pretty much won Round One (1793-1802) but Napoleon got greedy and, much to his surprise, the British restarted the conflict. French dominance on land and British at sea has so far led to a stalemate, but people in places like Longbourn are finding prices higher as the Little General tries (and fails) to institute a blockade of the British Isles, only to realize that you need to control the seas for that. Duh!  
֍ For the richer folks in Longbourn there is another consequence of the war. The government had reintroduced income tax in 1803 on a sliding scale from under 1% to 10%, and abolition is promised once the war was over. Which the government of the day would indeed do, holding a public bonfire of the records to show how good and honourable they were – except that they kept copies!  
֍ The tax most people have to pay is tithes, a tenth of certain goods to their parish priest for the upkeep of himself, his church and for the poor of the parish. The right to appoint priests to the most lucrative parishes had, in some way no-one quite knows, become some sort of hereditary office held by local squires, which is why being appointed to these 'livings' is something worth having.  
֍ Contrary to the common belief the distribution of wealth was much as it is today, except of course that the country as a whole was a lot poorer. Hence people like the Lannisters and, to a much lesser extent, the Blackwaters could live off the income from their estate (land and financial investments) and not have to actually do anything for a living.  
֍ Frightful as Mrs. Blackwater is in the story, her determination to get her omega sons married is in many ways justifiable. With the Longbourn estate entailed to her nephew the Reverend Blackwater-Strickland she was reliant on one or more of her sons making an advantageous marriage to support her in her dotage (although the vicar would have been morally obliged to offer at least some help). And with her sons only getting a small amount – about two per cent of Mr. Dayne's worth and one per cent of Mr. Lannister's – a union with either or both would have been wonderful. Not that she would have boasted about..... okay, she would never have shut up!

LIFE IN PEMBERLEY  
֍ Pemberley is almost certainly Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, on the edge of the Peak District whose spa towns and beautiful countryside were popular destinations for people in those days. Lambton is probably the nearby town of Bakewell; Jane Austen is reputed to have stayed there one time.  
֍ Life on a great estate like Pemberley may seem a relic of the past, especially given the changes in places like Sheffield barely ten miles to the north, but it had its advantages. A good lord could make a local peasant's life almost tolerable, although of course a bad one.... yes. At least the widespread use of potatoes meant that famines were pretty much a thing of the past in England, but the general poverty and start of the Industrial Revolution was leading some on the great estates to decamp to the cities for what they viewed as a better life.

GETTING AROUND  
֍ Turnpike (toll) roads which have been around for nearly a century by 1807, have made road travel faster but not cheaper. For those without their own carriages there are two options: the regular stagecoach which averages 3 mph (i.e. about as fast as one could walk) or the faster yet even less comfortable mail-coach ('travelling post') which averages 7 mph. They achieve this by paying an annual toll fee and sacrificing any idea of comfort as suspension is in its infancy. Either method is horrendously expensive; on average an 'inside' stagecoach traveller could expect to pay the same to get from London to Derbyshire in just under two days as to stay for a month in a reasonable hotel there. At least highwaymen were on the decline, helped by the increased availability of more reliable and cheaper handguns.  
֍ Travelling on horseback could be a lot faster. The ability to exchange horses at coaching inns would enable Jaime Lannister to get from Pemberley to London via the Great North Road, a little over 150 miles, in about twelve hours (average 12.5 mph).  
֍ Canals, which have been around for half a century in their modern form, have cut the costs of coal delivered to the communities they reached by half.  
֍ In a portent of the future that year, the Oystermouth (later Swansea and Mumbles) Railway becomes the first passenger railway in the world, using horse-drawn coaches to ferry people between the communities along Swansea Bay. It will convert to steam-hauled coaches in 1877 and will survive until 1959 when it will be sold off to the local bus company, who will immediately close it down.

OTHER STUFF  
֍ Despite his careless loss of the American colonies, war with France has made people look more kindly on the mentally unstable King George the Third, king for the past 47 years. It helps that there is also his terrible son and heir George Prince of Wales (soon to become the Prince Regent) to consider. The latter had been forced into a marriage with German princess Caroline of Brunswick in 1795; somehow they had managed one child, Princess Charlotte, before they had started living as far apart from each other as possible.  
֍ The rest of the Royal family.... well. Probably the best of a bad bunch is the king's second son Frederick Duke of York; he is the famous Grand Old Duke of York rather unfairly remembering his earlier military mistakes than his later good work as an army reformer. King George has five other grown sons: William (later King William IV), Edward, Ernest (later King Ernest Augustus of Hanover), Augustus and Adolphus, as well as five grown daughters, yet young Charlotte is incredibly his only legitimate grand-daughter from twelve kids. This will later prove.... unfortunate.  
֍ The United Kingdom reached its current form at the start of the century with the Act of Union with Ireland. It is also currently in personal union (sharing a monarch) with the German state of Hanover, most of modern Lower Saxony in modern north-west Germany. This has been going on since 1714 and will end with Victoria's accession in 1837 as Salic Law debars women from the Hanoverian succession, but the two countries are kept pretty much separate.  
֍ The population of the United Kingdom is on a steady rise and has just passed 12 million. The British Empire has just under 40 million people in British India, a further 2 million across the rest of Asia, three-quarters of a million in the West Indies, getting on for half a million each in Australasia and Canada, and just over 100,000 in Africa.  
֍ Jane Austen is writing at a time when many people still never left their village or local area, at least in the southern England she is familiar with. In the Midlands and North the Industrial Revolution has led to the rapid growth of towns like Manchester (90,000, up 72,000 in the last fifty years), Liverpool (80,000, up 58,000) and Birmingham (75,000, up 51,000), although none were even remotely close to catching London (1,250,000, up 550,000).  
֍ Jane is living in the small town of Southampton, where she moved from the hated Bath a year before. She has so far written one story _'Lady Susan'_ (unpublished). She seems to have liked the town but did not resume her writings until she moved to Chawton in north Hampshire two years later, _'Sense And Sensibility'_ being published a further two years after that (1811).  
֍ The Tory William Cavendish-Bentinck, better known as the Duke of Portland, wins the general election that spring. In a time of political fluidity he gets 216 seats to the Whigs' 213, but he has the support of most of the independents whose numbers will gradually dwindle over the coming decades.  
֍ Great Britain abolishes the slave trade. The law takes effect 1808; slavery itself will not be abolished until 1833 but it has been effectively outlawed in the British Isles since the 1770s.  
֍ Henry Benedict Stuart dies in Rome. Proclaimed as 'Henry IX and I' on the death of his elder brother 'Charles III' (Bonnie Prince Charlie) nineteen years earlier, this grandson of King James II (1685-1688) was the last Jacobite Catholic pretender although he had never pushed his claim as he was a cardinal in Rome. King George the Third had been providing his third cousin twice removed with a pension as the fellow had lost all his money in the French Revolution.  
֍ The Solar System acquires a new planet with the discovery of Vesta in between the orbits of Mars and Juno. This makes a total of eleven as it joins Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Juno, Ceres, Pallas, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. Only in the 1840s with the sudden discovery of a dozen or so additional members of the Asteroid (Main) Belt and Neptune will the four asteroids get demoted.  
֍ Sir Humphrey Davy, later famous for his safety lamp, isolates the elements potassium and sodium. He is also a founder member of the Geological Society, which starts in London that year.  
֍ Charles Lamb publishes _'The Family Shakespeare'_ , most likely written by his sister Henrietta. Shakespeare with all the rude bits taken out, it plumbs such depths of inanity that the verb 'to bowdlerize' enters the English language. A bit unfair on poor Thomas Bowdler who was only the editor of this unmitigated tat.  
֍ Poet William Wordsworth founds the Literary Society in London. He also publishes _'Poems In Two Volumes'_ including his most famous works 'I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud' ('Daffodils') and 'Upon Westminster Bridge' ('Earth has not anything to show more fair').  
֍ In France the Niépce brothers obtain a patent for an early type of internal combustion engine to power a boat. It worked, but very inefficiently.  
֍ Ludwig van Beethoven writes his _Mass in C_ and _Coriolan Overture_.  
֍ Thomas Jefferson (Democrat-Republican) was President of the United States, population then around 7 million. There were 17 states, the original 13 having been joined by Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, and five territories; Indiana (IN, IL, eastern MN and western Upper MI), Orleans (most of LA), Mississippi (most of MS and AL), Michigan (Lower and eastern Upper MI), and the recently-acquired Louisiana Territory (AK, OK, MO, KS, IA, SD, southern ND, southern MN, MT, eastern WY and most of CO). Jefferson faced a major crisis when British warship _'HMS Leopard'_ captured and boarded the _'USS Chesapeake'_ while looking for Royal Navy deserters, but was able to get away with an economic embargo against both Great Britain and France. For now.....

۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩۩


End file.
